Editor’s Note: Frida Ghitis, (@fridaghitis) a former CNN producer and correspondent, is a world affairs columnist. She is a weekly opinion contributor to CNN, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post and a columnist for World Politics Review. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.
The results of the 2022 midterm election have not been fully tallied and the crucial question – who will control Congress? – has not been answered. But on this day after, we can draw some initial conclusions.
First, there was no red wave, much less a red tsunami. Predictions of a huge Republican victory at the polls did not materialize. It was a deeply disappointing election for the GOP. In addition, it was a disastrous day for former President Donald Trump, who had hoped a Republican landslide would place him on a glide path to the nomination to become the party’s presidential candidate in 2024.
Whatever we find when all the votes are counted, it was a fine day for American democracy.
That’s because the movement spearheaded by Trump and his election deniers performed much worse than expected. Even some of the most dramatic Republican victories looked like a rebuke of Trump and his band of anti-democratic activists.
It was supposed to be a shellacking of President Joe Biden, but it was Trump who got the thumping.
In exit polls, 28% of voters said they chose their House vote “to oppose Donald Trump.” And just 37% said they had a favorable view of the former president, the presumed GOP front-runner, at least before this election. That should alarm the party.
On election night, Trump told an interviewer, “I think if [Republicans] win, I should get all the credit. If they lose, I should not be blamed at all.” But the evidence strongly suggests he deserves much of the blame.
For the past 100 years, the average midterm gain in the House of Representatives for the opposition party is 29 seats. This year, Republicans needed just five seats, a goal that seemed so reachable that practically every pollster predicted the GOP would easily clear it, especially given the high inflation rate and Biden’s relatively low approval. But Republicans are struggling to clear that low bar.
They may well do it. Rep. Kevin McCarthy may replace Nancy Pelosi as House speaker, but even if Republicans take the House, the Democrats’ performance is little short of amazing. Biden presided over the best performance by the party in power since George W. Bush in 2002, the first election after 9/11.
It turns out that Biden was right in declaring that democracy itself was at stake in the midterms. The argument resonated. Trump, and the election-denying extremists he endorsed, helped Biden and the Democrats make that case.
Biden, in fact, has said he chose to run for president in an effort to save US democracy. Given Tuesday’s results – even if his party loses control of Congress – he can take comfort in having made significant progress in achieving that goal. These elections were a victory for democracy.
The challenge to democracy is not over, unfortunately. Many election deniers won. But even those who emerged victorious, performed worse than the non-election-deniers. In other words, by parroting Trump’s lies about 2020, they pushed away voters who had supported other Republicans.
On the whole, it was a very bad night for some of the most prominent, most far-in-the-fringe – and most closely embraced by Trump – candidates.
In Pennsylvania, Attorney General Josh Shapiro trounced Doug Mastriano, who played an active role in trying to overturn the 2020 election and ran a campaign rife with antisemitic innuendo against his Jewish opponent. Trump’s far-right election-denying allies lost in Michigan, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maryland, and many other contests.
And in the high stakes battle for control of the Senate, Trump’s involvement may just hand the chamber to Democrats, as it did in 2020.
The football star Herschel Walker could still win the runoff in December. But anyone who heard him campaign or learned about his past knows he should never have been on the ballot. Trump apparently thought fame would do the trick, just as it did for him. So, he also backed TV star Mehmet Oz for the Pennsylvania seat. Oz lost to John Fetterman, who after suffering a stroke struggled to regain his verbal prowess, a key skill for a political candidate.
The rebuke of Trump was even visible when Republicans won.
If Trump was the big loser of the night, the biggest winner was his top rival for the nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who won in a landslide, and was greeted by supporters at his victory party with chants of “Two more years!” an acknowledgement that his eyes, like Trump’s, are on the White House in 2024.
That all happened within hours of Trump deploying one of his mob-style tactics, threatening to reveal “things” about DeSantis if he runs. The former president hinted darkly, “I know more about him than anybody, except perhaps his wife.”
Then there was Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, another Republican who won reelection, in a rematch with Stacey Abrams. Trump despises Kemp because, like other Georgia officials, he refused to overturn the 2020 vote, despite enormous pressure from the then-president.
To block Kemp’s reelection, Trump persuaded former Sen. David Perdue to run against him in the primary. That primary vote ended in humiliation for Perdue and for Trump.
Despite his awful showing, Trump plans to declare his candidacy soon. Most Democrats find the prospect hard to stomach, but most Republicans would also like him to just focus on his golf game. As the midterms showed, he is a threat to the party.
Democrats, meanwhile, are pondering who will lead them toward the next presidential election in 2024. Tuesday’s results showed Biden was not wrong – despite what the pundits said – when he said democracy was on the ballot. It paid off, showing again that his political instincts remain sharp. But the election also put the spotlight on some rising stars in the party. Among the candidates, several whose names are not well known across the country, stood out as smart, charismatic, committed to democracy – and potentially electable.
Soon, Americans will probably have to begin enduring another season of presidential campaigning by the most disruptive candidate in living memory, a man who has shown only disdain for democracy. Facing that prospect, it’s good to know the country took a step toward sanity this week, and that democracy fared rather well.
